Instead, they sank $450 of their dwindling severance checks into printing up 100 T-shirts reading: "I worked for a Dot.com and all I got was this lousy T-shirt."

Considering the dot-com T-shirts that cluttered reporters' drawers a year or two ago, you would have to say Peterson and Durano know their market.

Peterson, 31, and Durano, 28, met while working on a Las Vegas entertainment magazine. They moved to San Francisco last May, setting out on the gold rush at what felt like the right time, but turned out to be oh-so- wrong.

It took Peterson barely a week to land a job at MTV's online entertainment Web site Sonicnet, and Durano didn't need much more time to find a copy editing post at Upside Today, the online arm of Upside magazine.

Role of Security technology in active shooter situationsFox 26 Houston

US Marijuana Job Growth Could More Than Double By 2021Buzz 60

Flying Drone Clown Haunts NeighborhoodPopularMechanics

Volkswagen Sets Record for January SalesWibbitz

Ty Pennington's New Show Celebrates Small BusinessesCheddar TV

The Boats That Fly: A New World of SailingPopularMechanics

You know what happened next: Peterson was laid off in September, and the ax fell on Durano in January. They're freelancing so they can still pay the rent on their Alamo Square apartment, and they're dreaming up more ideas for dot-bomb products.

They'll need to act fairly fast, however. Like the dot-com salad days, there's bound to be an end to the dot-bomb times, too.

"This is just a temporary thing," said Peterson. "It went up quick and it came down quick, but the Internet isn't going away and dot-coms aren't going away."

MORE MORFORD: Fans of Mark Morford, relax. Morford is the edgy SFGate.com columnist who was suspended last week for an over-the-top take on a Philadelphia-area teacher who had sex with a 13-year-old student.

Morford's suspension was lifted this week, and his e-mail newsletter, the Morning Fix, was due to hit in-boxes again today. His column, Mark's Notes and Errata, which ran both in the newsletter and on the SF Gate Web site, will also return either tomorrow or next week, although it will only appear twice a week rather than five days.

The new schedule will enable Morford to "give it more focus and more editorial lead time." He said the episode is likely to cause him to be a little gun-shy, but he said, "I'm going to minimize that as much as possible."

SF Gate is the online arm of The Chronicle. Robert Cauthorn, vice president of digital media for The Chronicle, who had suspended Morford and two editors, said he had received about 60 e-mails on the subject.

While most of those e-mails were in support of Morford, Cauthorn said almost no one who wrote in had read the column that prompted the suspensions. I haven't seen the column myself, and it no longer exists on the Internet.

MERC MEMOS: The San Jose Mercury News said last month it would not lay off any newsroom employees, but some workers in other departments have received warnings that they will get pink slips unless they can find other jobs at the paper, according to the San Jose Newspaper Guild, the union that represents most of the paper's rank-and-file workers.

As those workers begin to feel the effects of the budget cuts, it's instructive to revisit some of the issues that led to them. And those issues are spelled out pretty clearly in a couple of memos that landed on my desk this week.

The memos are a communication from an exec at the Merc's corporate parent, Knight Ridder Inc. of San Jose, to Merc Publisher Jay Harris -- and Harris' reply, which doubled as his resignation letter. Harris' resignation shocked the industry, as it represented a rare case of a newspaper executive taking a stand against corporate demands for more profits.

Those demands are evident in the e-mail that Steve Rossi, the president of Knight Ridder's newspaper division, sent to Harris on Saturday, March 17. Among other things, Rossi said profit margins at the Merc "have ranged between 22 and 29 percent over the past 10 years, largely dependent upon the strength of employment advertising. We need to move that range up in order to be in step with the goal to move KR's overall margins up."

Boosting profit margins at a time when employment advertising is down and the cost of newsprint is rising certainly represented a tall order for Harris, and one he didn't feel could be met without hurting the news product.

While Harris' sentiments along those lines have been made clear in his public statements on the subject, his resignation letter also includes one other area of cuts that hadn't been discussed publicly. The Merc is among those Knight Ridder papers that return 1 percent of their annual operating profit to their communities in the form of donations to nonprofit organizations.

In Harris' letter, he said Rossi told him that Knight Ridder Chief Executive Officer Tony Ridder had approved a change in that donation, cutting substantially more than half of what the Mercury News gave to community organizations last year.

For a civic-minded person like Harris, who chaired the United Way effort in Silicon Valley, that was a cut too far. "The traditional policy of giving back to the communities from which we draw our profits is the right and responsible approach," he wrote. "A radical break from it, even for a few years, would place a needless hardship on the educational, human service and cultural organizations. . . . and violate an important tradition of our company."

Harris also apparently took exception to another key point of Rossi's e- mail: that San Jose is not that much different than other markets that Knight Ridder serves.

"If the Mercury News' market is similar to our other markets, the research will indicate that readers want more local news," Rossi wrote. He said the Merc has a lot of foreign news inside its front section, and adds, "This may be something to reconsider."

Harris struck back that Rossi "would be the first to say that he knows well neither the Mercury News nor the market it serves," and that he would prefer Ridder and corporate executive Jerry Ceppos -- both Merc alumni -- take more of a role than Rossi in decisions involving the Merc.

Harris also sounded one more alarm: that Knight Ridder, once known more for its Pulitzer Prizes than its profit margins, was losing its emphasis on its "moral obligation. . . . to excel in all that we do."

Harris closed by saying that, even though most senior managers get a financial package on their departure from the company, he will ask for no such package, only health and medical insurance until the end of the year.